Posts Tagged: arduino


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04
Sep 12

Slot Car Race Powered by Twitter

The community from RS Components created a Scalextric Slot Car Race that is powered by your tweets. Two cars went head-to-head last week with a live Twitter race between a red and blue car. The cars move based on the number of Tweets that included their hashtag. If you want the blue car to win, you needed to Tweet, “Go #RSBlueTeam”. The team wrote a web service like TweetControl that pulls in tweets from the Twitter Stream and distributes commands to an Arduino that controls the track. This is another great project that further demonstrates how social intersects with technology and marketing. Go Tweet Racer!

RS Components Twitter Race

[via Facebook]

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04
Jun 12

Solar Hot Water Temperature Monitoring with Arduino + ThingSpeak

Here’s another “Klink Family Adventure”. The Klink’s created a solar water heater monitor using an Arduino connected to multiple waterproof DS18B20 temperature sensors. What’s great about this project is that it has the complete schematic and source code for interfacing multiple sensors to ThingSpeak at the same time. This is a common request in the ThingSpeak forum, so we are glad to see the code in the wild. The application is great. Monitoring the yield of a solar water heating system allows you to keep track of efficiency and savings.

Here’s what the temperature looks like now in Australia:

Check out the family’s blog for the source code and to learn how to create your own solar water heater monitoring system.

[via Klink Family Adventures]

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11
May 12

Smart Home Project with ThingSpeak, Arduino, chipKIT, and Drupal

Via Twitter, we caught wind of a project by a group of Rutgers University SCI ITI students. As their final project, the team built a working model of a smart home using sensors connected to ThingSpeak cloud services via Arduino and chipKit. They were able to embed their data and integrate with their Drupal-based website and show a live demonstration of the smart house. Lots of cool technology went into their project including a small scale model complete with balsa wood and Popsicle sticks. This proved to be a great way to show how their project works with other students and faculty.

This video that we discovered on YouTube is the team’s presentation. You will get to see ThingSpeak in action, live in front of an audience about halfway thru…

We hope you got an “A” on the project (do they still give letter grades?)!

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07
Dec 11

CheerLights: Connecting Lights Together to Bring Us Closer

It’s that time of year… holiday time and family time. I was inspired this time to create a project that brings us a little closer. Lights are a big part of the holidays and with CheerLights you can connect your lights to other lights via Twitter with a little help by ThingSpeak Apps.

Since the project release, there has been much activity. A part from CheerLights being discussed on blogs like MAKE and Lifehacker, the community has created some interesting bits of tech that extend the project further than lights. So if you don’t have a way to connect your lights together with CheerLights, you can connect your mobile phone, browser, and web sites together by subscribing to the CheerLights feed. Right now you can check the latest CheerLights color with an Android App created by @ChrisLeitner. Another really neat thing is a browser plugin for Chrome designed by Josh Crumley. So, in the top corner of your web browser you can see the latest color in an unassuming way. It’s a little reminder that we are connected.

To join CheerLights, all you have to do is build something that subscribed to the CheerLights ThingSpeak Channel or access the data using JSON and XML. You can also use the apps, browser plugins, or web widgets to see the colors. Visit the CheerLights website hosted on Tumblr for details on making a controller with Arduino, ioBridge, or Digi’s ConnectPort.

To control CheerLights, just send a Tweet to @CheerLights and mention a color.

Just think when you send this Tweet that you are updating 1000′s of lights, apps, browsers, and widgets all at the same time.

Spread some cheer…

[via MAKE / Lifehacker / CBC / ioBridge Projects]

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17
Oct 11

Arduino 1.0 to ThingSpeak Sketch

The Arduino team recently released the release candidate of Arduino 1.0 on Google Code. It’s a available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Version 1.0 of Arduino’s IDE includes enhancements to the GUI and additions and changes to the Arduino Hardware API. Since the release, we have been beta testing Arduino 1.0-rc1 and find the updates to be spot on. This is definitely a step forward. A big change that affects ThingSpeak Arduino Sketches is the inclusion of DHCP and DNS support to the Ethernet library, which was integrated by Adrian McEwen. We are able to use the new Arduino 1.0 to make it as easy as possible to connect the Arduino platform to the Internet. Download the latest Arduino IDE on Google Code.

Arduino 1.0 and ThingSpeak Examples

We have created a new ThingSpeak Sketch for Arduino 1.0 that you can use for the Arduino and Ethernet Shield or the Arduino Ethernet all-in-one. All you have to do is add your ThingSpeak Write API Key to the sketch, upload to the Arduino, and connect to your network. The sketch includes automatic network configuration with DHCP, domain name resolution using DNS, a watchdog / reset function to keep the Arduino online, and a function to update ThingSpeak Channels. The new sketch has been running without hiccup in our lab for few weeks. We hope that you get the same reliability. Go ahead and copy, transform, and combine…

View Arduino 1.0 –> ThingSpeak Sketch on GitHub

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16
Oct 11

Arduino and ThingSpeak Examples are Now on GitHub

We are moving our Arduino Examples to GitHub to make it easier to copy, modify, and combine with your ideas. If you want to collaborate on creating the very best source code and examples for Arduino, feel free to contact us. We will be releasing our brand-new Arduino 1.0 sketches shortly. GitHub Speaks…

ThingSpeak on GitHub

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01
Sep 11

DIY Weather Station with Arduino, Processing, and ThingSpeak

[lars] created a weather station from scratch using sensors and bits from SparkFun and Adafruit. Lars wanted to log weather data and access it from remotely. He built the weather station using humidity, temperature, pressure, and light sensors collecting data from his apartment in Ithaca, NY. Originally, Lars was collecting data with his own web application created with PHP and MySQL. He has since started publishing his data to ThingSpeak where others can view the data and potentially build applications.

ThingSpeak Weather Station

Behind the scenes, Lars uses the Arduino microcontroller to collect data from the sensors and uses Processing to publish data to his ThingSpeak Channel.

From Lars’ project site:

The goal of this project is to log some weather data and be able to access it from anywhere. There is some sensor data (temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and ambient light) and some computed data (dew point). You can see the weather condition in my apartment in Ithaca, NY at my Thing Speak Channel 346. You can also look at the Google Chart of my own MySQL solution, which I no longer maintain.

Check out a detailed breakdown of the Weather Station project and more awesome projects on Lars’ project site, called “make.larsi.org“.

[via make.larsi.org]

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20
Jul 11

Connecting Arduino to ThingSpeak using Python

Over on the Tenet Technetronics Blog there are some great posts about how to connect Arduino to ThingSpeak using Python as the middleware. Please check it out and thank them for putting to together an awesome ThingSpeak Application Note and Video. The video demonstrates publishing sensor data to the web using ThingSpeak and Python. The sensor data is collected by an Arduino MCU.

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06
Jul 11

Using REST, Arduino, and Python to Update ThingSpeak Channels

[sirleech] of Australian Robotics created a project based on the RESTduino libraries by Jason Gullickson for Arduino-based microcontrollers. RESTduino turns an Arduino into a RESTful device and gives you the ability to access it with structured URLs. In this project, sirleech extends RESTduino with some Python scripting so that a RESTduino device can update a ThingSpeak Channel. Visit GitHub for the complete project source code.

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28
Jun 11

Instructables Make it Tweet Contest

[willnue] of NUEwire created a project for the “Make it Tweet Contest” over on Instructables.com sponsored by Adafruit. The contest is simple: make something tweet. If you use our ThingTweet app, sending a Tweet could not be easier. And, if you have an Arduino setup as a device on your ThingSpeak account, ThingTweet generates the Arduino sketch for you automatically. Here is the tutorial to help you get started with ThingTweet and Arduino: Update Twitter with ThingTweet and Arduino + Ethernet Shield.

willnue added the ability to tweet to his GE Wireless Control Center Alarm system. He added an Arduino with Ethernet Shield and uses the ThingTweet app to connect the alarm to Twitter. Check out his detailed Instructables to learn more, build your own social thing, and enter the contest.

NUEwire Tweeting Alarm System

wilnue says,

This project will add tweeting capabilities to the GE 45142 Choice-Alert Wireless Control Center Alarm system. The alarm system allows you to connect up to 16 different sensors across 4 zones and with the addition of the Arduino powered AlarmingTweet you can enable it to keep you informed of its status anytime anywhere.

Good luck with the contest!

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